Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

Many times, the banishment could have been avoided had the webmaster simply understood the rule. The rule is ‘Don’t be evil’. What is evil? It’s whatever Google says it is!

In this case, evil has to do with buying links. (How often it does!) You can obtain links from a site with high PageRank and the juice will flow to your site, making your own PageRank higher and making you rank better.

You following? The juice follows the link. All well and good, if the site links to you of their own volition. If, however, you buy the link, you credibility goes out the window. It looks like you are so pathetic a loser you are having to buy PageRank!

In reality, maybe you saw how much traffic that site gets per day, and just want to tap into it and see if you could get some of that yourself. You buy a links and start getting targeted traffic. All is well and good – at least until Google happens by.

Google will see the purchased link and think the worst (after all, you couldn’t possible be optimizing your non-SERP traffic, could you? No, surely you are fixated on PageRank and trying to be a trickster!

Body slam. Down you go. Fortunately, you can easily prevent this from happening by simply no-following any links for which you paid, and showing Google in good faith that you aren’t trying to create artificial value for your site.

Here’s what a hyperlink looks like in HTML:

< a href = http: // petsstyles.com > Doggie Duds Depot< / a >

And here it is no-followed:

< a href = “http: // petsstyles.com “rel=”nofollow” > Doggie Duds Depot < / a >

That’s all there is to it. You simply take away the opportunity for PageRank to flow to your site by putting up the roadblock no-follow, and you are back in Google’s good graces – in like Flynn.

Once you start using no-follow, you may see that some sites, blogs and forums have already taken care of it – on many site with high PageRank spammers will try to trickily get links to steal some of that rank themselves.

The simplest way to thwart the spammers is to take away any benefit. Many major sites such as Twitter, Knol and others have instituted an automatic no-follow attribute.

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